


Scream

by spacejargon



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-03
Updated: 2018-05-03
Packaged: 2019-05-01 19:37:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14527716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacejargon/pseuds/spacejargon
Summary: Mary walks out like it's an everyday scenario. Sam sees the truth before Dean wants to believe it.





	Scream

Thirty years and one hundred eighty degrees. Thirty-three to be exact. Sometimes she oscillates in and out of one hundred and eighty degrees. Almost as if she wanted to complete the circle she makes her orbit.

After the case with the dead children, she settled in place. His heart cracks open a little wider than when Dean pops off the tops of three beers and Sam doesn’t take one. Mom does, though she stares at it with a look of guilt and immediately something is up.

“I...I think I need some time.” Dean’s eyes snap to her. He’s alert, tensed and ears pricked like a hound on a scent. One drop of blood is all it takes to get the sharks swarming in. “I need some time to think.”

Dean’s shoulders are wide, spaced apart and from the looks of it, his heart is leaping into his throat. “What about? Something going on, Mom?”

She shakes her head and Dean deflates before he sucks in a sharp breath. He’s nervous. “After that case, I realized I need some time alone. It’s been thirty years and things...aren’t the same any more. No one I knew is alive anymore.”

Sam feels the murmur like a crushed hope and extinguishes it before it can filter into his voice. “We’re right here, Mom.”

Her eyes dart to Sam, not before sliding over Dean in agonizingly tender gestures that feel muted and strange when Sam watches. When he catches her gaze, she regards him like one would with a stranger. “I know that, Sam. But it’s been thirty years.” Her eyes sweep back to Dean, her lips twisting into a furl of a frown. “You’re not my little boys anymore.”

Dean is quick to jump on resolve. “Look, I know it’s been a long time, but you’ve been doing great so far with figuring it out. You’ve been using a laptop and a cell phone, so that’s something.”

Mary’s smile never reaches her eyes, dimples barely there like a hapless impression. She reaches out to him and cups his cheek, leaving Sam on the sidelines as he sits at the table, stepping past him. “You’re still my boys, Dean...Sam. I think it’s just too much change in not enough time. Being here with you boys, it brings back memories that aren’t there anymore. It’s hard to distinguish where my little boys end and now my grown up Sam and Dean start. I think it’s more of a shock now because I never really knew how much I missed my babies.”

“So...” Dean muses aloud, teetering on the edge of confrontational. Sam is pushing past it as the words ring loudly in his ears. “What’re you going to do?”

Mary’s shoulders are pinched and her expression is perfectly still, solemn as she stands firmly in place. The room could be swaying and she would stand out for being the only statue in the room. “I need some time to grieve. You’re both my boys now, but I miss my children who wanted and needed their mom.”

“What’re you talking about?” Sam spits and nearly leaps from his chair, stretching to meet her as his feet feel light and his head is starting to spin from her changed axis. “We want you, Mom. I need you here just as much as I did when we were kids.”

She looks like she’s going to cry and for the first time since he’s known his mom he wants to start screaming when she steps back. “I love you both. But I need time.”

Mary leaves and Dean doesn’t try to stop her when she tosses a look over her shoulder, and for some reason, it hurts more than the marks Dad left.

There was no zero to start from like Dean had. Dean had memories of her from when they were young. _Dean_ got a different Mary then.

Zero and one eighty feel the same.

~

Dean doesn’t talk to him for two days straight. When he does, it’s because Sam’s at his laptop and Dean has a beer in his hand he hasn’t taken a sip from. It’s open but as far as it’s concerned it’d evaporate faster than being drunk.

“Standing around moping isn’t going to do anything.” The words are sharpened barbs set up like a trail of spikes. Sam is a bottle of untapped anger and a special kind of misery that leaves him breathless and awake most nights since their mom came back. Her departure has gouged holes in Dean and reinforced the ones that lie in Sam’s memory. “She’s not the mom you remember. She’s Mary Winchester.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean, Sam?” Dean thumbs the top of his beer bottle as he turns sharply on his heels. “What the hell do you mean she’s not Mom? What the hell do you know?”

He can’t focus on the articles on his laptop he’s been absently scrolling through. His fingers itch and his bones can’t set properly. He’s on edge and tensed, gritting his teeth whenever the subject of Mom is brought up. But he can’t help the way he seethes as he ignores Dean’s glare. “I know from the short time she was here she doesn’t care about us. Wait—she cares about _you,_ but you’re not a little kid anymore.”

“Shut the _fuck_ up!” The beer bottle breaks in Dean’s hand with the sound of glass bursting against the edge of the table. Shards and beer fly everywhere, splashing Sam and his laptop with a hiss of retaliation. Dean doesn’t stop, his chest heaving when he grabs Sam by the collar and shoves him away from his laptop. “Shut up!”

Sam’s hands fly up in response and seize Dean’s arm, forcing him away from himself while the chair scrapes against the floor. “See? You’re acting like a kid throwing a tantrum. You’ve been like this ever since she showed up alive!”

“What would you know? You’ve been nothing but an ass to her! She’s our mom, Sam!”

Sam kicks off from the chair, all thoughts of drowning out Dean’s tantrum abandoned. “I know enough that she’s nothing like the Mom you told me about. You have memories of her being someone completely different—not a hunter who can’t stand to look at her adult sons.”

Blood trickles down Dean’s fingers and Sam’s sure he captures the glint of light reflecting off of glass embedded in Dean’s palm. “She didn’t want this life for us, okay? How would you know anything about how she felt, huh? You haven’t been dead for thirty-three years and then come back with _nothing!_ ”

Dean’s voice is rising to a fever pitch and Sam knows his own anger can’t be held in for much longer, which twists in his gut a little more at the irony. “You’re defending her, Dean! Just like you did with Dad!”

Dean’s hands slap on the chair where Sam had been sitting and he throws it for all it’s worth, making it crash into the wall as Sam stiffens into a defensive position. “I’m not defending anybody. Hell, I’m just trying to figure out why you’re acting like you’ve got a stick shoved so far up your ass you’re a fucking tree.”

Sam lifts a brow, eyes hardened and cold as the wrath quickly leaves him, replaced with a frigid rage. “Which is why you threw a chair at the wall. If you’re so unaffected, why didn’t you say anything? Why did you let Mom say that crap to us and leave? She looked like she was trying to apologize to you, but she doesn’t even recognize me, Dean.”

A lump forms in his throat. He can’t continue this argument any longer. Dean’s fingers tighten into a fist and his jaw cracks with the set of his jawbone. “Three decades, Sam. What would you do if you were dead for that long and then shoved back into the hunting life? What would you even think?”

Sam shakes his head and his eyes reach for the floor as Dean’s dismissive voice is steps ahead of him, predicting each retort and response like it’s a game of Battleship. “You’re right,” he shakes his head, staring at his feet until he can muster the courage to look up again into the glare of Dean’s eyes reflecting every arguing word he can throw at him. “What do I know. I’m not Mom. According to her, I’m not her son, either.”

“C’mon, Sam, don’t be like that—”

“Don’t be like what, Dean? ‘Cause the way I see it, you don’t want to hear anything I have to say. I’ve been stuck here while you and Mom butt heads because she’s clearly not the Mom you remember. She won’t even look at me like she does with you.”

Tightening his jaw, Dean lets out a hot sigh. “That’s because you don’t know what she sees when she looks at us, Sam. She’s disappointed because we’re hunters, and that’s what she never wanted for us. You heard her say it when you first met her. She’s still stuck on the fact that we were raised in the life that _she_ never wanted for us.” Dean is approaching him in hostile, clamoring steps. His eyes look wet and maybe not entirely from the beer bottle’s residue on his face. He still swallows and readjusts, a look of steel only as strong as its supports. “You know what she sees when she looks at me, Sam? She sees me as a damn failure. And the worst part? She thinks it’s her fault that I didn’t turn out the way she wanted. That I was supposed to protect _you,_ and I failed that too.”

“Dean—”

Dean jabs a finger at him, accusing. “So if you wanna feel sorry for yourself then that’s not my problem. But don’t think you’re the only one sitting here because Mom is _gone_ and upset about it. I want her in our lives too, but if that’s not what she wants, then we let her go do what she’s gotta do.”

There’s a fight dying in his bones. Mom has tilted the world upside-down and spun it on its axis in the path she’s left behind, tearing through the bunker like a tornado. A well-meaning, death-defying and painful trail of no promises and blind truth.

“You love her,” Sam chokes on a sigh and a sound of pity. It’s disgusting, watching themselves tear each other apart. “But she’s not Mom. She risked our lives when I was taken. She could do it again just as easily.”

“You were being tortured. What’d you expect, that she’d roll over and just go in there, guns blazing?”

Sam gives a wry smile. “Actually, yeah. I thought when she found me she’d look me in the eyes with anything other than pity.”

He turns and leaves, unable to croak out anything more before the defenses crumble and hell rises. Dean calls after him, his voice echoing in the hollows of the bunker.

“Sam! Don’t you walk away from me!”

His mother’s love is just big enough for one of them.

Maybe it can only fit her.

**Author's Note:**

> You want to know, know that it doesn't hurt me. 
> 
> Tell me, we both matter, don't we?
> 
> Thank you for reading.


End file.
